HTF BLU-RAY REVIEW: T2 Judgment Day - Skynet Edition - Page 2

Re: HTF BLU-RAY REVIEW: T2 Judgment Day - Skynet Edition

I agree about the menus potentially being a PITA, but after a little time with it, I was able to get around without a problem. That said, it's definitely a pain when I put in a Blu-ray to play a movie and it takes several minutes trying to access the internet to download stuff I don't even want. Of course, you can set the Blu-ray player not to access the internet without your permission, but even there you're bringing up extra menus and screens rather than just, you know, playing the movie...

As for the box office performance of The Terminator, I would agree it could be called a "sleeper." It was not a blockbuster or a major hit. Given how low its budget was, it was able to recoup its costs and do okay. It had two significant impacts before hitting video - it established James Cameron as an action writer/director where before he had crewed special effects units for films like Escape From New York. (And I wouldn't count Piranha 2: The Spawning as putting him on the map in this way...) For this reason, Cameron wound up involved both in Rambo: First Blood Part II and ALIENS, and his career developed from there.

The second big impact was that it established that Arnold Schwarzenegger could be convincing as something other than Conan, which he had already played in two movies. Schwarzenegger had actually made his first impact onscreen in two movies in the 70s, one being Pumping Iron and the other being Stay Hungry. (This is not counting other appearances he did at the time - these two were the ones that showcased his personality and paved the way for the Conan movies.)

I would equate the box office performance of The Terminator with what used to happen in the 1980s when a really cool new TV show went on the air. For the first season or two of the show, the ratings would be okay, but not spectacular, and the show would usually be at the best you would ever see of it. (For example, Miami Vice, Moonlighting, and even Dallas in its early days) For that first year, the show was considered "hip" and interesting, and the "cool people" were the ones talking about it in school or at work, etc. Word of mouth would spread, and by the time the show would come back for the 2nd season, you'd see the ratings go through the roof. At which point, the show would be considered "trendy", and everyone would be talking about it. Of course, by that time, the show had usually lost whatever edge it had and the initial fans of the show had moved on to the next new thing. (Miami Vice is a great example of this from the time. The show was groundbreaking during its initial season, but it usually ranked somewhere in the 20s - not counting the pilot movie. When it came back for its 2nd season, it was regularly in the top 10, but the bloom was definitely off the rose...)

How does this apply to The Terminator? In the way that the film wasn't a smash hit, but did create buzz for Cameron and Schwarzenegger. By the time it hit home video, there was enough word of mouth going around that the movie's popularity really went up. (This was cited in the reasoning behind doing a sequel in articles I read about it in the late 80s.) I still have a copy of a front page article from the spring of 1985 of the LA READER, talking about three new directors or teams that were people to watch. One was Michael Dinner (who had just done Heaven Help Us), the second was the team of Joel and Ethan Coen (whose Blood Simple had just come out), and the third was James Cameron, who talked about his experiences on The Terminator.

When T2 came out in July '91, it was a true smash hit, building on the box office that Cameron had achieved on ALIENS and The Abyss. And it's still doing great business - if it weren't, there wouldn't be so many home video releases. But ever since '91, the first Terminator movie has been in the second one's shadow. I personally was very happy to see the SE that MGM put out a few years ago, as it finally included the deleted scenes and gave it a little attention. And I was happy to see it ported over to Blu-ray with the same features.

As far as The Terminator or its sequel being romantic stories, I can only say that at the time the first one came out, nobody was saying anything like that. The attention for the first film went to the action sequences and Cameron's eye for detail. When the SE of T2 came out, I remember being stunned by the cast talking about all the romance in the first film and how that deleted dream sequence with Michael Biehn was so critical. Of course, if people enjoy that aspect of the films, I'm not saying that they're wrong to do so. I just didn't have the same experience of them. But then, that's the point of the forum, right? We all post our thoughts and hopefully learn from each other.

Re: HTF BLU-RAY REVIEW: T2 Judgment Day - Skynet Edition

StevenW, you read that correctly. The featurettes and interviews from the SD discs have been placed into the PIP interactive menu on the Blu-ray. In order to see them, you have to be watching the movie. That's part of the reason I recommended people hang on to their SD editions - so they could watch that stuff separately, and so that they would have everything, as I don't think all the featurettes were included in the PIP.